Soc Sci 125 Report on Grades

Grades serve a number of functions: they establish a system of incentives for students, they structure the nature of social relations in the educational process, and they provide needed information within the outside the university. We argue that the incentive function of grades and their effect on classroom relations are inimical to learning. Furthermore, we believe that the informational role of grades could be served through alternative mechanisms which would promote, rather than hinder, learning.

Incentives

Learning should take place for desirable social ends and for the intrinsic enjoyment of learning. The grading process establishes an undesirable reward structure in which obtaining a high grade becomes the motivational force. The indirect reward of a good grade replaces the direct satisfaction from the process of learning or the resulting knowledge as the final objective of many students. Such an incentive system is undesirable in and of itself.

However, the role of grades in educational institutions cannot be fully understood as long as attention is confined to the universities alone. Grades function to socialize students into the work force. On a job, workers do not obtain satisfaction from an intrinsic interest either in the process of production or in the resulting product of their work. Nor do they obtain satisfaction from the social usefulness of the product. Instead, they are motivated by the prospect of an external reward--wages received in exchange for labor power. In the workplace, the need to substitute external incentives for intrinsic interest arises because of the separation of the workers from control over the production process and its products. Grades play a important role in preparing young people for this kind of work environment. We object to both a economic system and an educational system which operate in this manner.

The content of the knowledge acquired by a student is also affected by grades. Those aspects of any subject matter which can most easily be reduced to a single one-dimensional measure increase in importance--such as for example, factual and quantifiable date. In the choice of pare topics, preference is given to small questions which can be easily researched and for which a complete answer can be developed in the limited time available. In order to assure a short-run payoff, the student tends to minimize risk by restricting his field of inquiry. As a result, the larger framework and context of his studies is taken for grated. Thus grades play a significant role in the perpetuation of the status quo in social inquiry. To this we object.

Structure of Classroom Social Relations

The power to give grades provides professors with a sanction for the exercise of authority in the educational process. Grades promote acquiescence and conformity among students and exempt teachers from the necessity of being relevant, interesting and well-prepared in their classes. Students refrain from criticizing mediocrity and dullness in part because of the fear of jeopardizing their grades, and in part because the process of grading has diverted attention away from learning itself. (We do not raise here the possibility the grades inspire political conformity between students and professors.) In general, the authoritarian relationship between teachers and students in a classroom is inimical to learning, and for this reason too we oppose grades.

Information

The principal external consumers of the information contained in grades are employers and graduate schools, who need to identify the students they most prefer and the ones they least prefer. Grades provide employers and graduate schools with a cost-less means of ranking students for their own purposes. But education should not be made subservient to their needs, particularly since grades interfere with the learning process. Graduate schools and employers could device their own mechanisms of evaluation and selection if students were not graded, as already happens with students from a number of colleges, such as Antioch, which do not grade.

Grades are also used to fill informational needs within the university. Students use grades to obtain feedback from their instructors on performance in class. Faculty members use grades from previous courses use grades from previous courses as guidelines for admitting students to their own course. The administration uses grades in allocating financial aid. Although we object to this last use of grades we do feel that information on student performance can be useful both to the student and to the teacher in the education process. The use of a summary letter grade is simply not the best means for fulfilling such informational needs.

For all these reasons, we find the grading process abhorrent, and we intend to substitute other mechanisms to perform those functions of grades that we feel should be retained. In our course we will prepare written evaluation of each student's work. The evaluation will be available to the student and to others if the student so requests. Further, we plan to arrange individual meetings between student and instructor during the semester. Finally, the organization of the course into small sections automatically provides continuous feedback to the students.

Therefore, we petition the Committee on Educational Policy to recommend to the Faculty that the grading requirement be removed from our course. Further, we ask for a public hearing with the C.E.P. concerning our petition and the general role of grades at Harvard. We would like to raise at the point the arguments for the complete elimination of grades from the Harvard educational process.